31. BEN
31
BEN
P regnant? Fucking pregnant?
As if things couldn’t have been bad enough, now I would be attached to her for the next eighteen years! Now I would have to look at the face that would never be mine, reminded of the woman who’d just played pretend for the next two decades.
Great. Just fucking great.
What the hell did I do to deserve this? If past lives existed, I must have been a real piece of shit to deserve the kind of hell that I’d been through in my life. The hits never stopped coming; I never got a break.
But I wouldn’t just stay away from her completely and put a check in the mail every month, a birthday, or a Christmas card for the kid as he grew up.
I wouldn’t just be a phantom father.
Sofia might have fucked me over by making me think this could be real, but that kid growing in her belly hadn’t done anything to deserve pain and anger and hatred, and I wasn’t planning on letting the child for one second think that his or her family didn’t want them.
The baby would be a Blackwood, after all. Unlike us four brothers, the child would start with a leg up in life, and I would be there every step of the way so that they knew they were wanted, knew they were loved.
I would be more than just a check in the mail to that child, and I would be more than family that turned its back on the child.
I would be everything my birth parents never were.
And if that meant I’d have to face Sofia for the next eighteen years, I guess that was how it would have to be. Parents made sacrifices for their kids, right?
It was what my parents should have done. And I wouldn’t be like them. I wouldn’t do the wrong thing and let that baby believe that he or she wasn’t enough, wasn’t wanted, wasn’t just a burden.
All life had value, and another little Blackwood in the family would bring happiness and joy and know that there was only love.
My thoughts turned to Sofia.
What was she going through, finding out that she was pregnant?
Frustration, probably. I couldn’t imagine that falling pregnant was a part of whatever plans she had.
Just thinking about her leaving pissed me off all over again.
This whole thing with Ben is just pretend, it’s not real and when it’s over, I’m leaving.
Her words echoed in my mind again and again.
Luke told me to go talk to her, to ask her what was going on and find out the bigger picture but that sentence she’d said had pretty much told me everything I needed to know.
How could I misunderstand that?
The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. Anger burned in my veins.
I preferred the anger. It burned away the pain, the heartache, everything else I might be feeling. I’d learned from a young age that being angry was easier than feeling any of the other feelings, and anger was my old friend.
All that remained now was to put on my face for Richard so we could seal the deal and Alex would be happy, and then this project was in the bag.
The rest we could figure out. I would talk to Richard at some point if he asked where Sofia was—either tell him she was traveling or tell her she left me.
Or something.
Maybe I would even tell him she was dead, get some sympathy from him since he could relate… God, that would be cruel. Just because I was so fucking angry with her right now didn’t mean that I had to do things that were so hurtful.
I was pissed off, but I wasn’t a dick.
At least, not a very big one. I had my moments, but Richard was a nice guy. He’d been through hell and back, and he’d lost someone so close to him.
I could almost relate to him in that way, anyway.
I felt like I’d lost someone close to me, too.
It just hadn’t been to death. It had been to heartlessness, to a game.
Because Sofia had never loved me, had she?
I was the one who’d started this whole charade, but she was the one who’d played her part so well that even I had fallen for it. She was the one who, after it all, had won the game, leaving the rest of the players in the dust.
A short while after three, I headed down to the lobby. It would be almost an hour until Richard arrived, but I was getting sick of sitting in my room, alone with my thoughts. The best way was to take care of business.
I walked into the dining room, sat down, and opened my laptop.
Work was my savior.
I could throw myself into it whenever I wanted to shut out the rest of the world, and the results were always two-fold—I worked my way upward and forward in the company, and I didn’t have to think about whatever was happening around me.
“Ben,” someone said, slicing into the hyper-focus mode I was in. I looked up, and Sofia stood at my table. She clutched her hands together in front of her, and strands had escaped from her ponytail so that she had a cute, disheveled look. Her eyes were filled with uncertainty.
“Can’t we talk about this?” she asked.
I pursed my lips. “What’s there to talk about?”
“I don’t want to leave things the way they are. I don’t know why you’re so angry, but if we could just—”
“There’s no we ,” I said tightly, cutting her off.
“Ben, please. After everything that happened between us, you want to tell me that there’s nothing?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” I challenged her. “Why don’t you tell me how this was just a game, how it was all pretend, and the last thing you want is to play happy families with me?”
Her face paled. “Did you overhear us?”
“I heard every word.”
She sank into a chair opposite me, and I wanted her to leave. What I hated more about her sitting here when I needed her to leave was the fact that even though I was furious with her, she looked incredible, and even though I wanted her to get the fuck out of my life, I wanted to pull her into my arms and wipe that vulnerable look off her face, protect her.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathed. “I don’t know how—”
“Costa Rica, huh?” I cut her off again, focusing on my screen.
When I glanced at her, her face paled.
“When were you going to tell me about that?”
“I haven’t even gone for the interview,” she countered.
“I thought you were happy here.” By here I wasn’t sure if I meant at Blackwood Inc. or with me.
“I am,” she said. “I just—”
“If leaving is what you want, then that’s what you should do.”
“Ben, now that I’m pregnant—”
“I’m not going to force you to stay.”
“You keep cutting me off—”
“Because there’s no need for you to elaborate. Like you said, this whole thing was pretend. I shouldn’t have lied to Richard, but you followed along and played your part, and you’re absolved of your duties. You can go now, do whatever the fuck you like.”
“Ben…”
“Go,” I said to her, my voice hard.
She looked at me, her eyes so fucking vulnerable I wanted to punch myself for being the one to hurt her. But she’d hurt me too.
She finally stood.
“Fine,” she said and turned. “Oh.”
Richard stood at the door, staring at us.
Fuck. How much had he heard?
“Excuse me,” she said politely and hurried away, leaving me to sort out this mess.
Nice.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone left me to fend for myself.
“Richard,” I said, plastering a broad smile on my face and I buttoned my blazer as I stood. “You’re earlier than expected. I’m so glad to hear that you’re okay.”
Richard’s expression was hard as stone. “Yes, well, I guess I won’t be joining my wife just yet.”
I swallowed hard.
“Please, sit down. I have everything ready for you so we can take care of business in a snap and not take the whole afternoon—”
“I’m not signing that,” Richard said, cutting me off.
I swallowed hard, trying to keep my smile in place, but it was faltering.
“The project really needs you,” I tried.
“Why?”
“So we can make a difference. So we can help the people, do the right thing…”
“What do you know about doing the right thing?” Richard asked.
I stared at him, trying to find the right words to get me out of this mess, but I was in deep, and there was no way to salvage this now. He’d overheard everything, he knew it had all been a sham, and he was pissed.
As he should be.
“I thought it was real,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “Love is so sacred, so pure. It’s hard to find the right person, and watching you and Sofia… I really thought you were one of the few who understood that, that you’d found each other despite the difficulties of this world. And it was all a show?”
I opened my mouth to answer and still couldn’t find the words.
“You kids are getting good. You really had me fooled. In my day, no one would have been able to get away with something like that—it’s just too hard to fake the kind of love that spans the ages. But these days, everything is different, isn’t it? Nothing is as it seems anymore. No one is as they seem. Right?”
I nodded slowly. I knew he meant me, but he wasn’t wrong.
Richard shook his head, but his anger had morphed into sadness.
“I’m so glad she’s not here,” he said softly. “If she saw something like this, it would break her. My wife was the kind of woman who believed in magic, in purity, that the world wasn’t as ugly as everyone tries to make it. But it is that ugly, isn’t it, Ben?”
“There is goodness in it, too.”
Richard laughed, but it was without emotion. “Where?”
Again, I couldn’t answer him, and Richard straightened, becoming upright, shutting himself off so that all the emotion, the sadness, the anger, drained away again. I guess we were all the same—pushing our emotions away until only the mask remained.
He tugged at his blazer and ran his fingers over his salt-and-pepper beard.
“I think I’ll be on my way now,” he said.
I wanted to call him back, racking my brain for a way to get him to still invest, but it was a lost cause. I wasn’t stupid—I knew when I’d fucked up so badly there was no going back.
I would have to crawl back to Newport with my tail between my legs, after all, tell Alex that I’d failed, that the project wouldn’t go through. He’d be pissed, disappointed. Or maybe he’d say that he’d thought it would work this way all along.
It’s not official until you have a signature.
Well, wasn’t that the truth.
I rode the elevator to my room, and as I rose higher and higher, I felt smaller and smaller. I’d lost the project, I’d lost someone’s trust in me, and I’d lost the woman I loved.
And all that was left was a shell, the mask, the man I always showed the rest of the world.
It felt like the real Benjamin Blackwood was gone.